Year 1 Visit the Big Cat Sanctuary
This week, to conclude our 'Animals' topic in Science, Year 1 visited the Big Cat Sanctuary in Smarden. We were incredibly lucky to have the entire place to ourselves.
Once we arrived we visited the education room. We took part in a fantastic workshop called 'Paws, Claws and Roars':
How do cats, from the biggest to the smallest survive in the wild? Learn all about the special adaptations from camouflage to claws that different cat species have to live and hunt in their environments. This covered the following curriculum areas:
- identify and name a variety of common animals that are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores
- describe and compare the structure of a variety of common animals
In this workshop we learnt some incredible facts including:
- There are 5 big cats - snow leopard, lion, jaguar, tiger and leopard
- Big cats roar, the rest which are small cats purr - they can't do the other!
- There is no such thing as a panther - it is not a separate species. They are just big black cats
- Lions gently headbutt each other to say 'hello'
- The male African Lion has the loudest roar
- If the cat has a long tail, it means it's a good climber, and a short tail means it is a good jumper
- It is very rare to be a white lion, they are not adapted well as they are very light so can't camouflage
- Tigers are orange because deer can't see orange (deer are their main prey) - they see the tigers as green and white so they blend in with the grass
- Leopards can carry 4x their size up a tree
- Some of the cats at the sanctuary had never seen grass before they arrived
Year 1 Big Cat Sanctuary
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